The Media

Scandal of Record

Stunned and furious, the New York Times staffers assigned to look into Jayson Blair’s phantom reporting learned their colleague was guilty of massive journalistic fraud. In an excerpt from his new book, the author tracks the team’s investigation—and growing realization that their bosses had been part of the problem.

On Saturday, April 26, 2003, Robert Rivard, the editor of the San Antonio Express-News, woke up and drove two hours out to his weekend cabin in the Texas hill country along the Llano River. He brought a pile of newspapers with him, including Friday’s Wall Street Journal and Saturday’s New York Times. Rivard started with the Times. “I got out there and I put my feet up, and immediately this front-page story caught my eye,” he says. The story’s dateline read “Los Fresnos, Texas,” and it was about Juanita Anguiano, a Texas woman whose enlisted son, Edward, was the only American soldier still missing in action in Iraq almost a week after retired U.S. general Jay Garner had set up office in Baghdad as the country’s new civil administrator. It was written by a reporter named Jayson Blair, and it got huge play—three columns spread across the most valuable real estate in journalism. The headline read, family waits, now alone, for a missing soldier.

Doors of deception: The front entrance of the New York Times building, at 229 West 43rd Street. Photograph by Mark Schäfer.

The Express-News had recently published a similar story about the Anguianos. Rivard assumed the Times had seen his paper’s story and had decided to follow up with a dispatch of its own. The Express-News story, written by a former New York Times intern named Macarena Hernandez, had run on April 18, eight days earlier. As Rivard began reading the Blair story, he suddenly felt uncomfortable; it seemed to him there were frequent echoes between the Times piece and the article his paper had run. But Rivard’s cabin has no Internet hookup and no phone, so he couldn’t look through his paper’s electronic archives or call an editor at his paper’s offices to compare the two stories. On Monday, he thought, when he was back in the office, he’d check this out.

Back at her office, Macarena Hernandez had also seen Blair’s story and had immediately recognized entire passages of her piece—lifted nearly verbatim. She was furious. Hernandez knew Blair. The two had been part of the same minority internship program at the Times in 1999. Now, four years later, it appeared as if Blair had brazenly ripped her off. “It was just completely obvious that he had taken major chunks of [my story],” Hernandez says.

First thing Monday morning, Hernandez talked to Rivard. She also placed a call to Sheila Rule, the Times recruiter who had hired both Hernandez and Blair, to let her know about the situation.

In New York, Sheila Rule told Times managing editor Gerald Boyd about Macarena Hernandez’s complaint. Boyd immediately summoned national editor Jim Roberts. Jayson Blair—a seemingly indefatigable 27-year-old reporter—had been working for Roberts for the last six months, ever since he had been drafted as an extra set of legs to cover the Washington, D.C.– sniper story, in October 2002. Boyd, Roberts, Rule, and Bill Schmidt, an editor in charge of newsroom administration, met in the managing editor’s office. It was a dispiriting meeting. “By the time I got there, they had already concluded this looked really bad,” says Roberts.

That afternoon, following the meeting, Roberts called Jayson Blair on his cell phone. Blair, who was supposedly down in Washington covering the latest hearing in the sniper case, answered. Roberts explained that questions had been raised about Blair’s Anguiano story and asked him if he had read Hernandez’s story in the Express-News. Blair said he hadn’t, and he mumbled an explanation. Roberts’s heart sank. “His initial response was fairly implausible,” says Roberts. “What he tried to say was that he had just mixed up his notes. But during that period I wanted things to turn out a lot better than they did. I had a real hope that the implausible was still possible.”

After he hung up with Roberts, Blair called Macarena Hernandez at her desk at the Express-News. “He calls, and he says, ‘I just want you to know I didn’t see your story,’ and I was like, ‘Jayson, come on. Of course you did,’ ” Hernandez says. “Then he says that maybe the quotes were so similar because he got the daughter to translate and she probably just said the same thing. At that moment, I knew. Juanita Anguiano speaks English.”

A couple of hours later, Jim Roberts called Jayson Blair again. Roberts told Blair he was being pulled off the sniper case—he’d need to come back to New York to answer some questions. Adam Lip-tak, the paper’s national legal correspondent, was already on his way down to Washington to cover Tuesday’s sniper hearing. “Even then, I had no idea what we were getting into,” says Roberts.

After being summoned by Jim Roberts on Monday afternoon, Blair came to the Times headquarters, on West 43rd Street, on Tuesday, April 29. He brought reporter’s notebooks containing what he said were his notes from Los Fresnos. “I was still wondering, Is it sloppiness? Is it plagiarism?” says Roberts. “But in those first 24 hours, even in my wildest imagination, I wouldn’t have conceived that he didn’t go to San Antonio.”

On May 1, Blair resigned instead of furnishing expense reports that would prove he had, in fact, traveled to Texas. By then, his editors were just beginning to realize they might be dealing with something much larger than simple plagiarism.

By the end of the day, the paper’s executive editor, Howell Raines, had decided he’d cut short a vacation at his fishing cabin in Pennsylvania and come back into the office the next day. He and Boyd agreed they needed to assign a team of reporters to the task of examining Jayson Blair’s career at the Times. The solution to bad reporting, Raines said, was good reporting.

On Thursday, May 1, the day of Blair’s resignation, Jacques Steinberg had arrived at the Times’s offices only dimly aware of the situation. Like everyone in the building, he’d read an article by Howard Kurtz in the previous day’s Washington Post in which Robert Rivard had raised questions about the similarities between Blair’s story and the one in the Express-News, but hadn’t heard much else. Steinberg had begun his tenure at the Times as a Washington-based assistant to the late James “Scotty” Reston, the man closest to a personification of an institutional voice that The New York Times had ever had. After his time working with Reston, Steinberg moved from Washington to New York, where he covered education for the paper for eight years. Then, in April 2003, after briefly filling in at the paper’s Los Angeles bureau, he moved over to the newspaper beat. It was a high-profile assignment: media coverage was one of the areas Raines was most interested in beefing up when he took over as executive editor in September 2001.

On Thursday afternoon, Steinberg and Lorne Manly, the Times’s media editor, were called into Gerald Boyd’s office. Manly, a bespectacled, curly-haired journalism junkie, had been covering the media industry for more than a decade. He was brought into the Times as the deputy media editor in early 2002 as one of Howell Raines’s first hires.

By this point, Bill Schmidt and employees from the paper’s news-administration staff had worked through Blair’s expense reports and other records. “It was suggested to me that there was a suspicion that he might not have been [in Texas],” says Steinberg. But no one had actually reached Juanita Anguiano, the mother of the soldier Blair had written about.

That afternoon, Steinberg tracked down Anguiano at her home in Los Fresnos—he was the first reporter to reach her since the story had broken earlier that week—and began to ask her about conversations she’d had with reporters, including one from The New York Times. As Steinberg conducted his interview, some of the reporters seated at the desks surrounding his realized what was going on. They gathered around his cubicle. It was at that point that Anguiano said she had to get off the phone. She was, she said, on her way to her son’s funeral—in the five days since Blair’s story had run, Edward Anguiano’s remains had been identified.

“I very gently told her I just needed to confirm this one fact,” Steinberg says, “that Jayson had actually been there to see her.” Anguiano said he hadn’t. “I kept apologizing profusely,” Steinberg says, “but I asked her—several times, as I recall—if she was sure he hadn’t been there. Was there any chance she had forgotten? Remember, it was just a completely alien thought, at that point, to me or any other reporter, that Jayson would have datelined a story and not gone there. This was thought to be just a dustup over plagiarism.”

Steinberg hung up the phone, stunned. He assumed there had to be an explanation. Maybe Blair had been in Texas but reached the woman only by phone? Maybe Anguiano had just completely forgotten about Blair’s visit? After all, she had had a traumatic several weeks: her son, thought at first to be merely missing, was then presumed dead, and now she was off to bury him in a military funeral. Steinberg conferred with Manly and then punched in Jayson Blair’s cell-phone number. His call was returned by sports reporter and Newspaper Guild representative Lena Williams, who was across the street at a hotel bar, trying to comfort Blair, who had resigned just moments earlier. Blair, Williams said, wouldn’t comment. Steinberg explained that Juanita Anguiano had just told him that Blair had never been to her house and that he needed to know if Blair had, in fact, even been in Texas.

“I said, ‘Lena, you know how this works. I need to show the reader that I’ve tried to convey this information to Jayson to get a comment. I spoke with the people in Texas, with Juanita Anguiano.’ Even at that point, as a colleague, I’m thinking there’s got to be some explanation for this,” Steinberg recalls. Williams put down the phone for a minute and then returned to the line. Blair, she said, was covering his ears. “And so I went back and said, ‘Lena, you have to tell him it’s not just that I spoke with her, it’s that she says he wasn’t there. She says he was never in Los Fresnos.’ And she said she’d try, but then whenever she went to him he’d cover up his ears.”

“I couldn’t ask the question. He didn’t want to hear the question you had,” Williams told Steinberg. Steinberg hung up the phone and turned to Manly. It now seemed entirely possible, they agreed, that Jayson Blair had never been in Texas. “I keep trying to come up with a better word than ‘surreal,’ ” says Manly. “But that’s what it was. It was like the twilight zone.… I mean, people would kill to get these assignments, to get a chance to go and talk to and write about people around the country. And here was this guy that might not even have bothered to get on a plane? What for?” Steinberg wrote up his story, a 643-word piece that ran on page A30 the following day. Blair, Steinberg wrote, had resigned. Steinberg quoted Juanita Anguiano as saying, “No, no, no, he didn’t come.” He also reported that before his phone call Juanita Anguiano hadn’t even been aware of the Times’s article by Jayson Blair.

On the morning of Friday, May 2, 2003, Gerald Boyd’s secretary summoned Adam Liptak to the managing editor’s office. Liptak, the Times’s thin, balding legal correspondent, had traveled an atypical path to the paper’s newsroom. For years, he had served as one of the paper’s in-house lawyers, working closely with the editorial side of the paper on libel and First Amendment issues. He’d always maintained an in-terest in writing—he’d written a fair amount for the Times and had once written a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker—but he was still surprised when, in 2002, Howell Raines asked him if he would be interested in serving as the paper’s national legal correspondent.

Liptak, whose five-year-old daughter, Katie, was in kindergarten at the Bank Street School on West 112th Street, had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for lunchtime, and when he was summoned into Boyd’s office he called his wife to tell her he might not be able to make it. “I had no idea what this was about,” Liptak says, “but, whatever it was, I assumed it was some issue that had to do with me.”

Liptak arrived first and sat alone, waiting. Boyd’s secretary had also called Jonathan Glater. Glater, an African-American reporter with wavy hair and braces, is exceedingly polite. Having arrived at the Times in the fall of 2000, he was coming up on his three-year anniversary. Before that, Glater had been removed from the world of daily journalism for half a decade, since he left The Washington Post in the mid-1990s. After the Post, Glater went to Yale Law School and then spent two years working as a lawyer, first in private practice in Buenos Aires and then as a litigator in the New York office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. The whole time he was practicing law, Glater says, he missed writing. In the summer of 2000, he decided to send out his clips. “The great thing about law is, sometimes you can make a difference—usually for one client at a time,” Glater says. “As a journalist, you can make a difference for a whole lot of people at once.” To his surprise, he was offered a job on the Times’s business staff covering law firms, accounting firms, and consulting firms.

Glater thought he’d been summoned for a debriefing about his recent monthlong reporting stint in Los Angeles. When Glater saw Liptak in Boyd’s office, he concluded that Liptak had been tapped as the next person to fill in at the L.A. bureau. To pass the time until Boyd showed up, Glater spoke to Liptak, recounting details from one of his more amusing and memorable stories. “Adultery May Be a Sin, but It’s a Crime No More,” published on April 17, 2003, was a lighthearted piece about a gated community more than an hour’s drive from Los Angeles that had recently removed from its books a statute outlawing adultery. Glater told Liptak about how he had driven all the way out to the community, called Rolling Hills, only to be turned back at the gate. As he was finishing his story, Boyd walked into the room.

“Well, at least you went,” said Boyd. That was the first hint Glater got that the meeting wasn’t going to be about Los Angeles. Jacques Steinberg and Lorne Manly arrived soon after. Boyd told the three reporters and one editor that he wanted them to work on a team that would examine the career of Jayson Blair at The New York Times. “The notion that Jayson wasn’t in Los Fresnos changes things substantially,” Boyd said. “We need to go back and look at everything, starting with the work he did for the national desk.” The team, Boyd said, should get started immediately. “The initial marching orders were not incredibly precise,” says Glater. “Our sense was we’d need to come up with 2,500 words by Monday or Tuesday.”

Boyd made it clear that the team would need to report on their superiors, including himself and Howell Raines. “He told us that he was going to be deciding what sort of cooperation to extend us,” Liptak says. “He was saying, ‘There are some things I might tell you, some things I might not. There are some records we might share, and some we might not.’ He was plainly setting up an independent unit in the paper to report on the paper.”

“We were going to report this as Times reporters,” Steinberg says. “It wasn’t even clear yet who was going to lead us, so we were told to just kind of sit tight and they were in the process of getting in touch with people who might head up the team. But it was clear we were heading into uncharted territory.”

Several hours later, in Portland, Oregon, David Barstow was returning to his hotel room. Barstow was a four-year veteran of the Times. After graduating from Northwestern, he spent three years as a reporter on the Rochester Times-Union. Then he moved to Florida to work on the St. Petersburg Times, one of the best regional papers in the country. While in Florida, Barstow was a finalist for three Pulitzer Prizes in three separate categories—breaking news, investigative reporting, and explanatory reporting. At the Times, he worked on the metro desk before becoming one of the linchpins of the paper’s investigative unit.

When Barstow arrived at his hotel the morning of Friday, May 2, he had several urgent messages telling him to call Gerald Boyd. Barstow’s first desk at the Times, back in the spring of 1999, had been across from Blair’s. Barstow wasn’t involved in the Times’s social scene; he never got to know the young reporter well. But he saw enough to know he wasn’t impressed. “On his best day,” Barstow says, “he was mediocre.” Barstow finally called in to the office and was told he was needed immediately for a project examining Blair’s career at the paper. He was to fly back to New York as soon as possible.

Everyone on the team had been chosen by the paper’s top editors for a specific reason. Liptak was chosen because he was a recent convert from the legal department. “He had a kind of mental rigor that we thought would be hugely valuable,” says Al Siegal, the Times assistant managing editor who was eventually put in charge of the project. Steinberg, as one of the paper’s media writers, was an obvious choice: “This was the biggest story, conceivably, he’d need to deal with, ever,” says Siegal. Barstow is one of the paper’s top investigators. And Glater, in addition to his legal background, was black. “We had decided on the other guys, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, this group is awfully white,’ ” Siegal says. “The fact that we had a reporter who was young and black and a lawyer was a no-brainer.”

Glenn Kramon, the Times’s business editor, had a lunch meeting on May 2. He didn’t get back to the Times until around three p.m., and by the time he made his way up to the third-floor newsroom several people had already told him that Gerald Boyd wanted to talk to him. Boyd told Kramon about the team that was being assembled to examine Blair’s career at the Times and asked Kramon to work on the project. “I had never worked with Jayson, which I think is one of the reasons they put me on this,” says Kramon. “I knew him to say hello to, but not much more than that. I did remember people warning me, ‘Boy, this guy is trouble.’ ”

That afternoon Glater, Liptak, and Steinberg, along with Manly and Kramon, assembled around a squawk box in one of the business department’s conference rooms and called Barstow in Portland. It was the first official meeting of the team that, in a bit of dark humor, some in the newsroom would call the Blair Witch Project. The meeting—and the assignment the team was asked to complete—was unprecedented in the history of The New York Times. The closest parallel to the team’s endgame—producing a published report on the paper’s doings—was an April 1, 1963, report filed by A. H. Raskin documenting the causes and repercussions of the 114-day newspaper strike that crippled the paper. (Raskin filed what amounted to a follow-up in 1974, detailing another bout of labor trouble for the Times and the city’s other papers.) But the 1962–63 newspaper strike had not only affected the Times, it had also shut down all nine of the city’s daily papers, crippling the entire industry. The mayor’s office and then the White House got involved with the negotiations. Thousands of jobs and millions of readers were affected—Raskin estimated in his story that “600,000,000 daily and Sunday papers went unprinted.” The Times had to cover the newspaper strike if it had any hope of re-establishing itself in readers’ daily routines. But, for the most part, the paper avoided reporting on its own mistakes.

From Portland, Barstow asked how many stories Blair had written, and the response that came back stunned everyone: more than 600. “I said, ‘This is nuts,’ ” Barstow says. “ ‘We need to be real about the magnitude here.’ ” By Friday evening, the paper’s top editors agreed to dedicate at least one more reporter to the project. Kramon called Abby Goodnough, a woman on the paper’s metro staff. “We needed someone else to help, at least just with the writing and wrapping it all together,” says Kramon. “I was aware too that this was an all-male team.” But Goodnough was out for the evening and didn’t get the call until the next day. Kramon also asked Joan Nassivera, the weekend editor for the metro desk, if she would call Dan Barry, then a general-assignment reporter, and ask him if he would join the team. Barry is a hard-charging reporter who cut his teeth at The Providence Journal, where he shared a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize for investigative projects. He grew up on Long Island, and the past several years had been overwhelming: he’d been diagnosed with cancer, had gone through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and had written a memoir titled Pull Me Up.

By the time Barry’s name was put forward, he was already at home in New Jersey. Before Barry made up his mind, he called Jon Landman, the paper’s metro editor, on his cell phone. Landman was at Yankee Stadium for the first game of a three-game series with the Oakland A’s. “I hadn’t had the assignment explained to me by Glenn or anyone else,” Barry says. “I basi-cally just wanted to know what the deal was .… And I wanted to be assured that this was going to be an endeavor of integrity.”

“Anytime you’re doing a project that might end up casting a really bad light on the people who run the joint … these issues come up,” says Landman. “By that time, things were pretty poisonous. But I told him to do it. I thought it would be good for the paper. And I didn’t think anyone would let the process be corrupted.” At 11:30 that night, Dan Barry called back to the Times newsroom with the following message: “I’m in.” The final team was in place.

On the morning of Monday, May 5, the team asked Howell Raines to send a formal staffwide e-mail asking reporters and editors to cooperate fully with any questions that arose. Raines refused. He told the reporters that if any staff members had reservations about cooperating they could come to him and he’d reassure them. For a team that was growing ever more certain that Raines’s autocratic leadership style and his bitter disputes with some of the paper’s other top editors would be likely topics of their story, it wasn’t the answer they had hoped to hear.

By this point, the reporting team was realizing the degree to which the increasingly dysfunctional culture of The New York Times had affected Blair’s career, especially in its latter stages. The Times—like every newspaper in the country—has always had its share of editors and reporters who feel disenfranchised or resentful. But under Howell Raines the frustration that normally simmered just below the surface seemed to explode. Desk editors weren’t speaking to one another. Reporters were almost at the point of open revolt. There was such fear of Raines’s temper and dismissive attitude that some editors said they kept to themselves concerns about shoddy stories or reporters.

A newsroom where editors are scared to voice their concerns is a disaster waiting to happen. Even worse is the newsroom where concerns are raised but ignored by the top editors. As the reporters were discovering, that seemed to be the case under Howell Raines. The more warning signs and newsroom admonishments the report-ers found scattered throughout Jayson Blair’s files, the more they became aware of a culture that seemed to discourage an open exchange of information, an exchange that likely would have prevented Jayson Blair from ever getting assigned to a story such as the D.C.-sniper story in the first place.

By that afternoon, “we were already seeing that there were going to be some pretty awkward questions that we were going to have to ask our bosses,” Barstow says. “It was clear we had to address management issues,” says Manly. “We all worked there. We knew the problems. The obvious question for the reader was ‘How the hell did this happen?’ Part of the answer was that Jayson was well liked in spite of his problems. But part of it was how things changed under Howell, how senior management felt frozen out, how a malaise set in and people just stopped fighting back.” The team grew more nervous with each day and sought ways to protect themselves and whatever they might uncover. That day, Glenn Kramon and Lorne Manly asked Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to recuse themselves from the editing process. Boyd, without making a commitment one way or the other, said it was his fiduciary duty to read every story that went into the paper. Still, by Monday afternoon, Al Siegal was brought in to oversee the entire project.

To call the 64-year-old Siegal a Times institution is an understatement. He has worked at the Times almost uninterrupted since 1960—virtually his entire professional life—briefly as a reporter, but mainly as a copy editor and then as one of the newsroom’s senior editors. Since 1977 he has overseen usage and style throughout the paper. More than any other person—more than publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., more than Howell Raines, more than famed Washington correspondent R. W. “Johnny” Apple—Al Siegal is the institutional memory and conscience of The New York Times. He’s in charge of the paper’s corrections. Siegal is the person editors go to when they want to know what the precedent is—if the Times ever let its columnists disavow a news story, for instance. He’s the man who wrote the 96-point headline that ran across the top of The New York Times on September 12, 2001: u.s. attacked. (It was only the third time in the history of the paper that such a large headline type had been used. The other two times were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, in 1969, and when President Richard Nixon resigned, in 1974.) And it was Al Siegal who named the special section created to cover the aftershocks of the September 11 attacks “A Nation Challenged.” For Sie-gal, Howell Raines’s tenure had been a happy change. He felt more vital than he had under Raines’s predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, and appreciated the extent to which Raines made him realize he was needed in the day-to-day operations of the paper.

Siegal’s seriousness, dry manner, and physical presence make him an intimidating force at the Times. He’s a heavyset man, and he moves with purposeful intent. Not a small number of reporters and editors find him cutting and occasionally cruel, and his public dressing-downs can make reporters and copy editors feel both superfluous and stupid. But no one doubts his love for The New York Times. After he was put in charge of the project, members of the reporting team began to petition Siegal, asking for a guarantee that neither Howell Raines nor Gerald Boyd would see the final product before it was printed. “They half begged and half demanded,” Siegal says. Some reporters said they’d heard that Blair had protectors among members of the masthead. The reporters tried to argue on precedent, drawing a comparison to the report filed by the ombudsman of The Washington Post in the wake of the 1981 Janet Cooke scandal, in which a young reporter was found to have invented the eight-year-old heroin addict about whom she wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning feature story. Siegal told the reporters that Blair didn’t have any protectors and that The New York Times didn’t have an ombudsman. The story would be edited in whatever way the executive editor saw fit. “I don’t seek that kind of autonomy,” Siegal says. “The editor is the editor. But I told them I would do what I could do to see there is no tampering. I will throw my body in front of it. I couldn’t understand what everyone was so scared about, because I wasn’t afraid.”

At nine p.m. on Monday, May 5, the team gathered in the page-one conference room for dinner. It was a ritual that would last all week. The conference room sits at the top of the staircase that connects the third and fourth floors. Several times every day, the paper’s top editors meet there to discuss the next day’s paper, with Al Siegal and the executive and managing editors presiding over the meetings. “We would talk a little bit about what was going on,” Barry says of the team’s dinners, which often featured large amounts of barbecue. “But we’d also just sit there with this sense of exhaustion.” By this point, the team had realized that the Los Fresnos story was only the tip of the iceberg: Jayson Blair had, in all likelihood, spent months acting as if he had been traveling around the country on assignment while actually remaining in New York City the entire time.

After dinner that Monday night, Steinberg and Barstow continued poring over the detritus of Blair’s career at the Times. “It was excruciating,” Steinberg says. “We’re sitting there trying to figure out: O.K., if he had breakfast at this restaurant in Brooklyn, maybe he still had time to get to D.C. by the afternoon?” Adam Liptak and Jonathan Glater were making calls to the subjects of Blair’s stories, and Dan Barry was prowling the newsroom, looking for people to interview. Glater had to call several people Blair had written about who had lost family members in Iraq.

“That night, I couldn’t sleep, because I was so mad,” Glater says. “I was calling this person up who suffered an incredible loss. And of all the inane and irrelevant things to talk about, I’m asking, ‘Do you remember talking to such and such a reporter?’ It just felt gross.”

“We were seeing indications that he was literally e-mailing the national editor about his progress on a story from another floor in the building,” when he said he was out on assignment, Steinberg says. “That night, we’re sitting there as a group, saying for the first time, O.K., this could be a gigantic fraud. The initial mandate—to correct the record—wouldn’t be enough. To say he got this story wrong was not explaining who is this guy and how did he carry it out and how did he rise.”

It was hard not to be shocked. There had been numerous cases of journalistic malfeasance in the past. But with the exception of Stephen Glass, a New Republic reporter who had invented out of whole cloth a number of feature stories in the late 1990s, there weren’t any comparable cases of widespread, almost sociopathic fraud. And The New Republic is a rarefied political weekly that reaches only a tenth of the Times’s daily audience. Glass was writing feature stories about made-up fringe groups. Blair was stitching his fraudulent accounts into some of the most heavily covered stories of the day. His “reporting” had been featured on the front page time and time again. It was moved on the Times’s newswires and reprinted by other papers around the country. The Times is the paper of record. What it prints is history. Blair had fabricated history.

“As we went on, we realized the level of journalistic crime here is much worse than some cribbed notes,” Barry says. “He was literally not showing up. It was dawning on us that, with cell phones and laptops, this was a whole new age in terms of journalism and integrity. [Blair] showed how someone could get away with this. And to explain this, we wanted to do a classic New York Times takeout.”

At the start of Monday night, the five reporters had identified half a dozen stories they suspected Blair had either fabricated or plagiarized. After an all-night session, Steinberg and Barstow had identified more than 30 stories that seemed to be problematic. On Tuesday, Manly reported to Al Siegal that the number of suspect stories was now up to 36—almost exactly half of the 73 stories Blair had written since he had been temporarily assigned to the national desk in October. “Al just said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s more than a half-page story now, doesn’t it?’ ” Manly says.

The rest of the week was marked by the growing tension between the reporting team and the paper’s two top editors, as both sides realized the extent to which Raines and Boyd would necessarily figure in any accurate explanation of the Jayson Blair saga. “Monday, May 5, was the one time Howell got really mad at me,” says Kramon. In a meeting with Kramon and Manly, Raines barked out that he wanted to know why none of the reporters had asked to speak with him yet—if he had been working the story, Raines said, he’d damn well have talked to the people in charge. “He was saying that I didn’t know how to do an investigation, that I was doing it all wrong,” Kramon recalls. “He was as angry as I’ve ever seen him.

“He was realizing it was getting out of control. This was a far worse problem than anyone had realized. But I just said, ‘I’ve been through enough of these, and I’m gonna do it the way I always do it,’ ” Kramon says. “I knew the guys were already working 18-hour days. There was no way I was going back in that room and telling them I caved, because they just would have killed me.” Unbeknownst to him, Raines’s intractability was helping to strengthen the bond between the reporters and their editors. He was also painting his own portrait as the classically combative, defensive subject of an investigative report. Kramon stood firm. “I was used to having chief executives in my face [because of reporters’ articles],” he says. “You have to ask yourself, Do you think you have a case? And if you do, you stick with it. And in this case it was pretty clear we had a case, so I just said to Howell, ‘I’m working with a bunch of professionals. You’ve got to let us do our job.’ ”

Gerald Boyd, meanwhile, took the opposite tack and went out of his way to appear congenial. On Monday afternoon, he walked up the staircase to the fourth floor and into the room where the team was working. Everyone froze, and several of the reporters moved to cover their screens. Lorne Manly stood up and walked over to the door. “I just wanted to see if anyone needed anything,” Boyd said. Manly walked him outside.

“We knew they wanted us to talk to them,” says Liptak. “In the ordinary course of things, you’d jump. But we wanted to move as methodically as we could from start to finish.”

Liptak met with Boyd, more to appease the managing editor than to ask specific questions. The newsroom was already rife with speculation that Boyd, who, like Blair, is African-American, had been an important booster in Blair’s career. “I found him to be very defensive, in a very unseemly way,” Liptak says. “It made me think that he viewed Jayson’s story and his own as quite intertwined. He seemed to feel there was a whole lot riding on this. He kept ticking off all the things he and Jayson didn’t do together. ‘We didn’t have lunch; he never came to see me in my office; we never talked about his career.’ For him to be running for cover like that struck me as very unbecoming. The reality is, he did play a very significant role in Jayson’s advancement.”

Dan Barry scheduled a pair of appointments with Raines. “I just went and said, ‘I hear you have something you wanted to say,’ ” Barry says. At first, Raines was welcoming and friendly. He focused on the sizable number of corrections the Times had been forced to run on Blair’s stories, corrections which were already coming under scrutiny from outside reporters. Raines stressed that corrections weren’t necessarily a good indication of a reporter’s progress, how some of Blair’s corrections were due to caption errors or simple misspellings. “We had already gone so far beyond that,” says Barry. “But I just heard him out.”

Steinberg, meanwhile, began talking to Arthur Sulzberger on Thursday. That day, Steinberg told the paper’s publisher that there were at least three dozen stories by Jayson Blair that contained plagiarized or fabricated material. “I was calling him as a source, and I asked him to keep this to himself,” Steinberg says. “I felt strongly and the team felt strongly that we as a newspaper needed to be the first to report this number.” Sulzberger, Steinberg says, was unequivocally accepting of that arrangement.

Dan Barry and David Barstow, the main writers of the article, delivered a preliminary draft of the story to Al Siegal on the morning of Friday, May 9. At nine a.m., they were due for their final interview with Howell Raines. It would be the last time they would talk to him before they filed their final story. They had been working around the clock, catching catnaps in empty offices or grabbing a few hours of sleep at a hotel across the street. “We did not look like two professionals in the mother ship,” says Barry. “I’m completely unshaven,” says Barstow. “We looked like two hungover, mangy dogs.”

By then, Raines’s demeanor had changed markedly. Earlier in the week, he had been comfortable with the explanation that Jayson Blair was a rogue reporter who would have been impossible to catch under any circumstances. By Friday, as the team’s understanding of the situation grew, Raines’s own self-confidence seemed to have waned. Yes, Blair was a sociopath. But there had been ample warnings, and at times Raines and Boyd seemed to have pointedly ignored those warnings because of their disdain for the editors who were doing the warning. Raines was taking dozens of media calls a day, and on some level he must have realized that he was fighting for his job. At nine a.m., when Barry and Barstow showed up at his office door, he had still not said whether he’d edit the final piece.

“At that point in time, given how tired we were, I felt like I just found my foundation in the core principles of journalism,” Barstow says. “We were blocking and tacking, reverting to the basic essence of who you are when you go in to talk to a powerful person.” Barry agrees. “There was little sense of us talking to our superior,” he says. “All three of us had our game faces on.”

Each reporter had his own legal pad on which he’d listed topics to address. How well did Raines know Jayson Blair? How had Raines responded to complaints from a federal prosecutor about Blair’s sniper coverage? Had Raines ever seen Blair’s personnel file? Had he been aware of his well-documented problems on the metro staff? Had he signed off on Blair’s promotion to the national staff?

“He did all the things you typically see in those kinds of interviews,” says Barstow. “Sometimes he used Rumsfeldian intimidation. Sometimes it was Clintonian hairsplitting.” Raines had his own written notes, and he referred to them frequently. “This,” Barry says, “could not have been fun for him.”

The interview lasted nearly three hours. At the end, Barry and Barstow told the executive editor of The New York Times the extent of Blair’s deception—that of the 73 stories Blair had written between October 2002 and May 2003 at least 36 had substantial problems. “He was floored,” Barry says. “He didn’t know that.”

As dismaying as the investigation was for the team, they appreciated a good story and were proud of their work. “In the piece, we were already heading in the direction of this being a low point in the 152-year history of the paper, and this was our scoop,” Barry says. “We didn’t want [Raines] to deliver it to our competitors.” The reporters knew when the news broke that Blair had falsified dozens of stories, it would become one of the biggest journalistic scandals ever. They also felt sure that the fiercely competitive Raines would protect the scoop for the paper he ran, even if it was a personally painful exclusive. “We’re walking out the door,” Barry says, “and we tell him we’d hope he’d keep it to himself. He assured us that he would keep this as a Times exclusive. Then we shook hands and walked back up to the fourth floor.”

Raines had also finally agreed not to read the report unless there was a last-minute need. Sulzberger, too, had called Siegal to ask if there was any reason he needed to see the piece before publication.

“Clearly, if you’re putting a story in the paper that bears upon the organization being dysfunctional and is going to reflect badly on its top leadership, a case can be made that the publisher should see it ahead of time, or the executive editor, or both,” Siegal says. “But given the climate of opinion and morale in this newsroom, I think they saw value in being able to say, ‘Let the chips fall where they may.’ At that time, I was conscious of the nervousness of the reporting team, which had asked me several times and at many stages, ‘Are you sure that what we write is going to go in the paper?’ And I told them, ‘What you write is going to go into the paper if I think it is accurate, responsible, and proportional.’ ”

That night, Friday, May 9, at six, Raines appeared on PBS’s NewsHour, where he spoke with former Times correspondent Terence Smith. Raines wore glasses and a striped tie, and he looked puffy and exhausted.

Smith asked Raines to explain how Blair’s deceptions had been discovered and what else was being done to examine his work. Raines answered, “One of the things that we have asked this reporting group to do is to work through the record. They tell me, in the course of interviewing me today, two of our reporters told me that they had already found 36 instances of fabrication. As I say, we’re committed to fully disclosing every circumstance of this.”

Almost immediately, Jacques Steinberg’s phone rang. It was a colleague from the Washington bureau, who said he had no idea there had been so many stories. When Steinberg asked him what he meant, he repeated what Raines had just said on TV. “I said to the other guys, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Howell just went on PBS and gave them the 36 number,’ ” Steinberg says.

Barstow and Barry were furious. They flew out of their desks and bounded into the newsroom, looking for Raines. They never found him and eventually calmed down. “It was probably good we didn’t find him right then,” says Barstow. “He was exhausted. We were exhausted. For all we know, he just forgot about his promise.”

All that night and into the next morning, the team banged out the final version of its story, which ran for four full pages of the Sunday, May 11, paper. They knew that many on the paper’s staff were hoping for a takedown of the paper’s leadership. “It was pretty palpable that week that there were a sizable number of people on The New York Times that wanted this to be the story of Howell Raines,” Barstow says. “This one incident at long last revealed all the pent-up grievances about Howell’s tenure as executive editor. And it wasn’t that we didn’t feel this was a valid subject of inquiry down the road, but on this story our assignment was to explain Jayson Blair.” Barry agrees. “We weren’t looking to effect regime change,” he says. “And we didn’t harbor any personal animus for Gerald and Howell. In my case, at least, those two men treated me well.”

“We all in some way love the institution,” says Barstow. “It’s a complicated love, but there was a sense that the best service we could do here was use all of our combined skills to do the most complete job we could humanly do.

“I remember thinking before that the great lesson in American history is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. We wanted this work to represent the fullest picture possible. I was astonished at what had happened to [the accounting firm] Arthur Andersen—here’s this great institution, and it is no more because of shredded documents. We wanted to make sure that didn’t happen here.”

On Monday, May 12, after being prompted by one of his editors, Howell Raines stopped by the fourth-floor training room the reporting team had been using as its headquarters and perfunctorily thanked them for the job they had done. Boyd also came by and shook the reporters’ hands. “We were very proud of the piece,” says Liptak. “And we probably weren’t sufficiently sensitive to the fact that all sorts of people had wanted it to be about Howell, or they wanted it to talk about race—I don’t think they read it for itself.” The team quickly discovered the extent to which their reactions to Blair’s deceptions, and to the newsroom culture that had enabled them, were out of sync with the rest of the newsroom; the reporters had had, after all, a full week to make sense of the details in the piece, details their colleagues were just now beginning to process.

At the same time, the team was wondering about their futures. Says Barstow, “We were all half waiting for the time when we’d be told, ‘We really need a seasoned journalist to lead the resurrection in the Westchester Weekly section. That’s really the paper’s highest priority right now, and you’re our guy. And, by the way, you start on Monday.’ ” Raines was, after all, known to hold grudges. “We were sort of wondering,” says Liptak, “who was going to end up at large-type weekly.”

It was Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd who would be exiled, not the reporting team that put together the dispatch on Jayson Blair’s sorry career at the most revered newspaper in the world. In the days immediately after the publication of the report, Raines scrambled to meet with editors and reporters, desperate to find a way to build a constituency in the newsroom he had spent much of his tenure alienating. A disastrous, staffwide town-hall meeting on May 14 rapidly degenerated into an open bitching session, as staffer after staffer voiced grievances. By early June, Raines and Boyd had been fired, their dismissal a result as much of their imperious leadership as of Blair’s bizarre deceit.

By the end of the summer, Bill Keller, the man who had been passed over in favor of Raines in 2001, had been named the Times’s new executive editor. Slowly, life at 229 West 43rd Street returned to normal.

On May 11, 2004, one year after the publication of their report, the seven men who had conducted the Times’s Blair investigation met at Blue Smoke, an upscale barbecue joint on East 27th Street run by celebrity chef Danny Meyer. The locale was a nod to the dinners they had scarfed down in the page-one conference room one year earlier; as often as not, their takeout feasts had been from Virgil’s, a Times Square barbecue restaurant with all the charm of a T.G.I. Friday’s. Those meals had been grim and came at the end of exhausting days. This one was much more celebratory. The next day, the Times would run a glowing review of Barry’s memoir, Pull Me Up, by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who called it “an extraordinarily lyrical look at a mid-20th-century working-class Irish-American family.… Mr. Barry has managed to find the richness of heart of a now oddly distant America.” Everyone at the dinner was happy in his job and generally upbeat about the future.

“One of the great things about journalism is that when you’re thrown into really difficult stories under tight deadlines you forge these amazing friendships,” says Barstow, who in April won his first Pulitzer Prize, for a series he co-authored on workplace safety. “This experience will bond me to these guys forever. We were in a foxhole, and we’ll always remember that.”